A sharding strategy that skips the consistent hashing step and simply uses the first N bits of the key to decide which shard the key falls in.

Do not use this sharding strategy unless your key space is naturally evenly populated. This is generally only true if you use some sort of randomly generated key WHOSE RANDOMNESS YOU CAN RELY ON. Do realize that if an untrusted client or component has the ability to choose its own key, then this sharding strategy opens up a denial of service attack vector by defeating your sharding altogether.